By the time the Ordnance Survey captured the site on its six-inch map in 1842, the two features were already sharing the same ground, an Early Medieval enclosure and an industrial structure from a completely different era overlapping in a way that was presumably practical rather than reverential.

The fort itself is a rath, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a single earthen bank and ditch, of the kind that served as a farmstead across Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. At Kippagh, the surviving bank runs from the southeast around to the north-northwest, with an interior diameter of about 27 metres and an interior floor that sits noticeably higher than the surrounding field, a detail recorded by Bowman in 1934 when he measured the bank at around four feet in height and noted that the inside ground level was approximately two feet above the exterior. He recorded it at the time as sitting on J. Galvin's land, a single-ramparted fort of roughly 32 yards across. The gap in the bank to the west-northwest, about two metres wide, likely marks an original or later entrance. The 1842 map depicts the whole thing as a hachured triangular enclosure, an approximation that reflects how earthworks read on the ground when trees and scrub begin to soften their outlines. By the early twentieth-century maps, only an arc of the bank remained clearly legible.

The site sits in pasture on a gentle north-facing rise, with a laneway running along its northern edge. Part of the bank and some of the interior have since been planted with coniferous trees, which obscures the shape from ground level but also, in an unintended way, marks the site out against the surrounding farmland.